Tell Gove what you think (the easy way)

When I was working in government, in the Cabinet Office and the Home Office, much discussion went on about how to make government consultations more available to everyone. Commentable format, that would be accepted, read and considered. In the digital world we were in, it was recognised that the consultation process needed to be changed to that everyone could have a democratic voice.

Well, the work continues on how to make that open, but we have a situation here that we just need to forget about fixing that for the minute (make it my problem for how we formalise the responses in order to make sure your voices are heard officially,there will be a way) and take the JFDI route.

No, not the…

This one…

Michael Gove has opened his consultation on ICT in education, the one he referred to in his speech last week. His speech was very long and full of lots of information, some have accused it of not saying very much – but what he definitely said was that this consultation was coming, and that he ackowledged the problem. Which is a great start.

This is a very important consultation and opens a whole new door to open education and should not be ignored. But the consultation is in the formal format and requires you to answer specific questions, and not see what anyone else has said.

So, Craig Snowden @CraigSnowedIn, a 17 year old developer from Scotland who answered a twitter call to open the consultation, popped it into Google docs.

In Google docs you can read and comment, and see others’ comments, and properly understand what this might be saying.

Now, this is not the formal process, but there is no reason why the comments cannot be fed into the formal process and I will volunteer to do that. So if you fancy meandering over, having a read and saying what you think should be said, then go here. It is unbranded, it is not pretty, the formatting remains from the original. But it is a document, and you can comment as you wish, inline. (Just highlight the part you want to comment on, go to the ‘insert’ tab, scroll down to comment and Bob’s your Uncle).

The original and official consultation is here should you wish to formally respond directly.

Note: Closing Date: Wednesday 11 April 2012

If you have no idea what this is all about, here are a few blog posts that might help: